There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help. - Charles Dudley Warner

Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.

The Bible is the best illustration of the literature of power, for it always concerns itself with life, it touches it at all points. And this is the test of any piece of literature — its universal appeal to human nature. When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households, the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh laws — only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and Virginia — the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them.

Politics makes strange bedfellows.